When words just won’t suffice, we turn to emojis and GIFs!. We took a look at all of the emojis and GIFs sent between January and March to find out what the most popular expressions were and how they were used by our Kik community.

“The struggle is real for brands to entice app users to keep coming back,” says Localytics about the recent update of its app user retention study. Localytics found that 24% of users abandon apps after using them just one time – the second-highest abandonment number tracked by the mobile platform company since 2012. The study also found that the number of users returning to an app more than 10 times went down slightly to 37% in 2017, compared to 38% in 2016.

Who’s working at Kik? Nicole Nearing, Trust and Safety Manager and fitness guru

Nicole Nearing joined Kik in May 2013, fresh out of university. In keeping with her passion and enthusiasm for keeping Kik communities safe, Nicole became Kik’s Trust and Safety manager last month. We asked Nicole about her two loves, user safety and physical activity.

More than just a credit card replacement

It has now been a year since Kik launched the Bot Shop, and I’m more than happy with how far chatbots have come in that time. We’ve seen tens of thousands of chatbots built for Kik, and our users have exchanged billions of messages with them. Six chatbots already have more than a million users. But there’s a lot more to be done. Any successful platform must help developers build, grow, and monetize — and we’re still missing that final piece.

Today, we’re rolling out our most exciting feature of 2017: Storyz. Our users love expressing themselves, and they also crave new ways to be more and more authentic. This new feature lets them do both, and is backed by the power of chat!